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Before we depart for the holidays, here are some final reminders about next week’s submission deadline!

Your term project and extra credit submissions are group activities, and thus should be uploaded to your group folders. Your make-up submissions are individual activities, and thus should be sent to me via email.

There is one exception. If you are a “group of one,” you can (if you wish) upload your make-up submissions to your folder and still maintain your privacy.

I’ll respond to each student with a “confirmation of receipt” email message within 24 hours of the submission deadline. You must respond to my message immediately if you believe that I have not received some element of your work.

And when is your work due? Unfortunately, that’s a bit complicated …

1. According to our Course Series Chart, our 2:30 pm section is Series N and our 4:00 pm section is Series U.

2. According to our Final Exam Schedule, Series N’s exam occurs at 8:30 am on Friday 12/15, and Series U’s exam occurs at 4:00 pm on Thursday 12/14.

3. So our 2:30 pm class section’s work is due on Friday at 8:30 am, and our 4:00 pm class section’s work is due on Thursday at 4:00 pm. However, term project groups with at least one 2:30 pm section student and one 4:00 pm section student must submit all group work at the earlier time, i.e. on Thursday.

Good luck with all of your final exams and projects! And then … enjoy the holidays. 🙂

We won’t schedule any advance reading assignments this week. Thus, each quiz will only cover the content that we discussed during the previous session.

Incidentally, I summarized last week’s Common Grounds Cafe content (that I wrote on the whiteboard) in a MS Word handout entitled Common Grounds. You can download the handout from our blog’s Documents folder.

Please keep in mind that we discussed slightly different material in our two class sessions last Thursday. Our 2:30 pm class discussed the coffee selling business at Common Grounds, and our 4:00 pm class discussed the weekly performance event business. Although I summarized all of our discussions in the MS Word handout, for quiz taking purposes, you might find it helpful to attend the same section this Tuesday that you did last Thursday.

Final Exam Week

Your term project and extra credit submissions are group activities, and thus should be uploaded to your group folders. Your make-up submissions are individual activities, and thus should be sent to me via email.

There is one exception. If you are a “group of one,” you can (if you wish) upload your make-up submissions to your folder and still maintain your privacy.

I’ll respond to each student with a “confirmation of receipt” email message within 24 hours of the submission deadline. You must respond to my message immediately if you believe that I have not received some element of your work.

And when is your work due? Unfortunately, that’s a bit complicated …

1. According to our Course Series Chart, our 2:30 pm section is Series N and our 4:00 pm section is Series U.

2. According to our Final Exam Schedule, Series N’s exam occurs at 8:30 am on Friday 12/15, and Series U’s exam occurs at 4:00 pm on Thursday 12/14.

3. So our 2:30 pm class section’s work is due on Friday at 8:30 am, and our 4:00 pm class section’s work is due on Thursday at 4:00 pm. However, term project groups with at least one 2:30 pm section student and one 4:00 pm section student must submit all group work at the earlier time, i.e. on Thursday.

Finally, here are a couple of clarifications about our term project:

1. Yes, I regret that you must include all of the rows and columns of your transaction analysis “Value Chart” in all of your Chapter 03 and 04 Notes work.

2. However, your “first year of operations” need not necessarily stretch for a full twelve months if your business is seasonal, or if you expect to demonstrate the long term sustainability of your business in less than twelve months. I’ll discuss these distinctions in detail on Tuesday.

As you know, we’re planning to dedicate the final two weeks of the course to our term project and extra credit activities. On Tuesday, we’ll discuss effective communication techniques. And on Thursday, we’ll dive into the development of a financial accounting plan for an off-campus PC program.

In advance of our class on Tuesday, please watch the first seven minutes and forty five seconds of an interview with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. In particular, please pay attention to the final two minutes of this segment regarding Amazon staff meetings.

Then, in advance of our class on Thursday, please watch a pair of videos. The first one is embedded in a PCSB web page entitled Common Grounds Cafe Offering Memberships. It is approximately four minutes long.

Tuesday’s quiz will only cover the advance assignment for that day. Thursday’s quiz will cover the advance assignment for that day and the material that we discussed in the classroom during the previous session.

Hey, let’s get ready for the home stretch of the semester! And in the meantime, please enjoy the extended weekend.

Welcome to Thanksgiving Week! And, of course, to the start of our holiday season.

As you already know, this week is an abbreviated one for us, given that we’ll only meet once on Tuesday. Although we’ll resume our practice of scheduling advance reading assignments after Thanksgiving, we will not do so this week.

We discussed these frameworks in class last Thursday. The links to these frameworks are included in the Extra Credit web page that we reviewed in class; you can visit the web page by clicking on the Extra Credit menu link on our course blog page.

Please note that only the Octopus-shaped chart on Figure 2 (page 13) of the Integrated Reporting document, the cubic chart on page 5 of the ERM document, and the four-box Input row of the VyT chart will be quizzed. These images are all included in very lengthy documents, but you will not be quizzed on those entire documents … just the images!

We’ll take our quiz and discuss our term project in more detail on Tuesday. And then we’ll say farewell and disperse to celebrate Thanksgiving!

This is it! We’re about to complete our review of the accounts of a general accounting system. We’ve progressed through all of the major asset and liability accounts; this week, we’ll cover the equity value accounts.

We will focus on the Chapter 11 Notes handout. Once we complete that review, we’ll turn the page and begin to discuss our term project and our extra credit activities.

As always, we’ll take a quiz at the beginning of each session. Our Tuesday quiz will address the payable and receivable content that we discussed last week, i.e. the content in the Chapter 10 Notes handout. And our Thursday quiz will address the content in the Chapter 11 Notes handout.

We won’t schedule any advance reading assignments this week. But in future weeks, when we focus on case-based material, we’ll begin to assign such readings again.

For now, though, let’s focus on Equity Value … the final section of our chart of accounts!

We’ve done it! We’ve completed our review of the asset accounts of an accounting system. And so, this week, we’ll proceed to our discussion of the liability accounts!

Specifically, we’ll focus on Loans Payable. And because every loan features a lender as well as a borrower, we’ll discuss Loans Receivable as well.

We won’t assign any advance reading assignments this week. Nevertheless, as always, we’ll review an in-depth handout. It is entitled Chapter 10 Notes, and it can be downloaded from our Documents folder.

As we discussed in class last week, we’ll try a slightly different approach to preparing for our quizzes. Tuesday’s quiz will cover Asset Depreciation. When you prepare for it, in addition to reviewing our handout entitled Chapter 09 Notes, you are now welcome to review a document entitled Chapter 09 Sample Exam too. It is a quiz from a previous semester’s class.

Thursday’s quiz will cover the first two (of four) scenarios of our handout entitled Chapter 10 Notes. We’ll discuss that content in class on Tuesday.

After this week, we’ll wrap up our review of the illustrative examples of the accounting system with a discussion of the equity value accounts. But first, this week, we’ll focus on liabilities.

First and foremost, thank you for following up with your brief term project descriptions last week! By the time we meet on Tuesday, I will either upload my own brief comments to your online folder, or I will contact you by email if I have any noteworthy concerns.

Then, this week, we’ll continue to move across our Chart of Accounts by discussing Property and Equipment. The handout for this material will be entitled Chapter 09 Notes.

We’ll also continue our discussion of the term project. And we might have time to venture into an introductory discussion of Loans Payable.

Furthermore, we will not assign any advance readings, so each quiz will only cover the content of the previous session.

Of course, I’ll have an additional thought to share with you this week …

We’ve now completed our review of Accounts Receivable! And at the beginning of our Tuesday session, we’ll take a quiz that covers the revised version of our Chapter 08 Notes handout.

Then we’ll proceed to our discussion of Inventory. By tomorrow (i.e. Sunday, October 22), I’ll upload the notes for the Inventory chapter to our Documents folder. It will be called Chapter 06 Notes.

Our Thursday quiz will cover the General Concepts bullet points on our Inventory handout. The remainder of the handout, i.e. the numerical chart numbers and calculations, will be covered on the quiz of Tuesday, October 31st.

Oh, yes … what about the term project activity that was originally due by Monday morning, October 23 at 8:00 am? We initially mentioned it in last week’s blog posting.

It is now due on Thursday morning, October 26 at 8:00 am. Here it is:

I have uploaded a PDF document entitled Mike’s Sample to each team’s Box, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive folder. You’ll delete this sample document and replace it with a brief description of your term project topic.

We’ll discuss the format of your description during our next class session.

And by the way, there are no advance reading assignments this week. Please focus on preparing for your quizzes!

Congratulations! We have now completed our review of the Cash and Risk Management functions, culminating in last week’s classroom discussion of a television episode from The Office. In that episode, the office accountants struggled to function as a team in order to investigate the theft of $3,000 in company cash.

We relied on the Risk Management Cube paradigm to structure our own approach to this challenge. We also discussed how the Giving Voice To Values self-reflection approach can prepare professionals to function as an investigatory team.

Our first quiz of the upcoming week, at the beginning of Tuesday’s session, will cover this material. Then we’ll shift our focus to the Accounts Receivable function.

Yes, we’re moving left-to-right across our Value Chart of Accounts! And Accounts Receivable is “next up,” so to speak.

On Tuesday, we’ll discuss the general terms and concepts that are relevant to Accounts Receivable. These appear in the PDF document entitled Chapter 08 Notes; you can find it in the Documents folder on our course blog page.

On Thursday, we’ll take a quiz regarding these terms and concepts. And then we’ll review each quantitative row of the Value Chart.

Oh, yes … we’ll continue to make progress with our Term Project activity as well! I have uploaded a PDF document entitled Mike’s Sample to each team’s Box, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive folder.

We’ll work with this document in class on Thursday. And by Monday morning, October 23 at 8:00 am, you’ll delete this sample document and replace it with a brief description of your term project topic.

What will be the format of your description? We’ll discuss our options during class on Thursday. And then I’ll document our plans in next weekend’s blog posting.

As you can see, we’re slowly-but-surely raising the bar on our term project activity. And we are doing likewise with our knowledge of accounting!

We’re going to experience another exciting “first” this week! It’s our first assignment of the term project.

No later than Thursday, October 12th at noon, please send me an email message that lists: (a) the names of your team members for your term project, and (b) the online document management platform that you have chosen for your work.

You are welcome to select any professional platform, though I would suggest that you consider:

When I receive your message, I will establish an online folder on that service, and I will send each member of your team an “invite” to access it. I will then ask you to post a brief description of your project in that folder.

What else shall we accomplish on Thursday?

Let’s “try out” a policy of taking four-question exams at the beginning of each period, with the Thursday exams covering a brief set of concepts, and the Tuesday exams covering a broader set of quantitative material.

This Thursday’s exam will cover:

(a) The four questions in the blog post entitled Risk Management: Is Rubin to Blame for Citi? You can find the blog post by entering the Documents folder on our blog’s home page and opening the document entitled Cash – Link to Reading Assignment.

(b) The front side of the colorful cube that we reviewed in class last week. You can find it on page 5 of the Executive Summary of a report entitled Enterprise Risk Management – Integrated Framework. That document is also available in our Documents folder; it is saved as a PDF document entitled Cash – Risk Management.

But before we do that, we need to schedule our examination on the accounting model. So, at the beginning of our session on Tuesday, we’ll take an eight question exam on our Chapter 03 and 04 Notes handout.

The handout contains a significant amount of material, so we won’t assign any advance readings for the week. And we won’t schedule a quiz for Thursday.

Once we complete Tuesday’s exam, we’ll discuss and finalize a general policy for scheduling quizzes in the future. But let’s take one step at a time … let’s focus on Tuesday’s exam first!

This will be another momentous week for us! We will begin to take quizzes at the start of each session, covering the content that we discussed during the previous session, as well as the advance reading assignment (if any) for the current session.

So please be sure to arrive on time! The quizzes will be very brief, and if you arrive late, you might miss them entirely.

This week, we won’t schedule any advance reading assignments, so the quizzes on Tuesday the 26th and Thursday the 28th will only cover the previous session’s material. We’ll begin to assign advance readings during the first week of October.

That’s when we’ll assign our first term project assignment as well. So what will we cover this week … other than the quizzes?

First, we’ll complete our review of the Chapter 03 and 04 Notes handout. And we’ll discuss a special type of transaction that is called an “Accrual Entry.”

Then, if time permits, we’ll begin to work our way across the Value Chart from left to right, and discuss specialized applications for each column. We’ll begin doing so with the Cash column on the far left.

Most importantly, though, this week will be Quiz Week. If you have any questions about the material, please let me know.

Congratulations on mastering debits and credits last week! This week, we have even more excitement to look forward to …

… we’ll learn about Journal Entries and T Accounts!

And if we really want to push the envelope, we’ll discuss trial balances too. 🙂

This is the first week of the semester that falls after the “add a course” deadline at Providence College, and so we’ll begin to formalize our learning activities. Here is a synopsis of our plans:

1. After completing our review of our Chapter 03 and 04 Notes handout, we’ll dedicate some classroom time to walking through the pages of the first four chapters of the textbook. This activity will either occur on Thursday the 21st or Tuesday the 26th.

2. Our first quiz will occur on Tuesday the 26th. It will cover what we discuss in class during the previous session (i.e. on Thursday the 21st), and the brief reading that is assigned for the current session (i.e. for Tuesday the 26th). Each subsequent session will also feature such a quiz.

3. This Thursday the 21st, please come prepared to verbally describe a potential term project topic. Just two or three sentences will be fine! You are welcome to work with any number of students you wish, and you can welcome students from either section into your group. You are also welcome to work as a group of one.

The topic must be a concept for a for-profit or non-profit business that can be launched from your dorm room or off-campus apartment with minimal start-up funds. It must produce some beneficial social purpose, other than (or in addition to) generating profits.

By the time we reach the last week of September, we’ll be fully immersed in the intellectual content of our course. We’ll be ideally positioned to shift comfortably into a mid-semester frame of mind, having mastered the essential components of the Financial Accounting model.

Hello, all! I hope you’re enjoying the weekend. We’ll continue to review the accounting process for Luca’s Cleaning Service this week, and then we’ll proceed to our next case example.

That next example will be a very detailed one, covering bookkeeping practices like Debits and Credits. But let’s take things one step at a time.

First, if you have not yet downloaded a corrected copy of our Chapter 01 and 02 Notes document, please remember to do so. As you may recall, on both sheets of the original version of that document, I accidentally wrote the word “Inventory” on the Income Statement. I’m very sorry about that!

Third, please note that there is now a new PDF document on our blog site. It is called Chapter 03 and 04 Notes. There’s no need to worry if you cannot follow it on your own; we’ll review it in class together. But you might wish to glance at it in advance.

By the time we complete our review of that new case, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of the accounting model. And we’ll be ready to start talking about quizzes and term projects.

Once again, though … let’s take things one step at a time. After all, Luca is still waiting for us to help him summarize his second day of business. 🙂

I hope you’re enjoying the holiday weekend! And, of course, I hope you enjoyed the beginning of the academic year last week.

As you know, we introduced ourselves to the Assets Minus Liabilities Equals Value equation last week, which is the modern double-entry system of accounting that was first codified by Friar Luca Pacioli. That double-entry feature is what helps us to check our work by enabling us to calculate Value via two different methods.

As we discussed, we won’t begin scheduling quizzes or advance reading assignments for another two weeks or so. However, I will distribute a more elaborate e-document version of the brief Cleaning Business example that we reviewed in class last Thursday. So please bring an electronic device to follow along during our next two classes!

I’ll distribute the e-document in PDF format, so any electronic device — laptop, tablet, or phone — should do the trick. You’re welcome to share a device with a friend.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I look forward to continuing our conversation on Tuesday!